The following was passed by LSA members present at the Annual Business Meeting of the LSA in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 8, 2010 as a "sense of majority of the meeting" resolution. It was submitted to the membership at large in May 2011 for a "sense of the majority of the membership" and passed by a majority of the members responding.

Whereas the practice of linguistic fieldwork is shifting to a more collaborative endeavor firmly based on ethical responsibilities to speech communities and a commitment to broadening the impacts of scholarship; and

Whereas this shift in practice has broadened the range of scholarly work to include not only grammars, dictionaries, and text collections, but also archives of primary data, electronic databases, corpora, critical editions of legacy materials, pedagogical works designed for the use of speech communities, software, websites, or other digital media; and

Whereas the products of language documentation and work supporting linguistic vitality are of significant importance to the preservation of linguistic diversity, are fundamental and permanent contributions to the foundation of linguistics, and are intellectual achievements which require sophisticated analytical skills, deep theoretical knowledge, and broad linguistic expertise;

Therefore the Linguistic Society of America supports the recognition of these materials as scholarly contributions to be given weight in the awarding of advanced degrees and in decisions on hiring, tenure, and promotion of faculty. It supports the development of appropriate means of review of such works so that their functionality, import, and scope can be assessed relative to other language resources and to more traditional publications.

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